


Dreams of Flying

by KittyViolet



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Best Friends, F/F, Flying, Friends to Lovers, Long-Term Relationship(s), Outer Space, Suicidal Thoughts, Teasing, X-Men Gold (2017) #30
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-28 23:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16251869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: Title says it. Lots of angst at the start, happiness and something hot near the end.





	Dreams of Flying

Every student of Charles Xavier's has learned to remember their dreams with total clarity; it's a required move for psychic defense, given how many enemies— the Shadow King is only the best known—will try to get into your mind that way.

Some people's dreams are nonsensical, or horrific, or wish fulfillments. Kitty's are mostly memories. Sometimes Kitty believes that remembering them is the worst thing she's learned how to do. At other times, she's been glad; it's all she had.

*

Time doesn't pass, in the way it would pass on Earth, or in a Shi'ar ship, or on a satellite. And Kitty thinks about satellites often: she'd rather be one. Magneto's satellite, an ordinary communications satellite, anything that circles the Earth and speeds through space and never leaves.

Kitty believes she will never see anybody she loves again. She has considered materializing in deep space while fused to the bullet. That would end it all. But she won't do that; for one thing, she probably can't. She's fused to whatever metal it is, and it's a metal that responds to psychic energy; once she's attached, she's attached. It's like the way she disrupts circuitry, but in reverse; she herself has been disrupted psychically, and it would take a master of magnetism working at the peak of his powers to even ever try to bring her back.

Was there anything else she wanted to say, or wishes she could have said, to Illyana, to Piotr, to Rachel, to Logan, to everyone else she loved? If she had known this would happen, she would have written last-minute letters. But she would have had to decide what to say.

Sometimes she tries to remember her favorite songs. In the worst moments she remembers songs she didn't even like. One moment it's a delight, thirty seconds of melody caught from Yaz, or Erasure, or Sandy Denny, or Cats Laughing. (She'll never know what happened to them now.) The next, it's an earworm by REM, or a Deerfield neighbor's violin practice, an older boy she never liked. But she liked Deerfield. It beat disappearing.

Deep space feels like when she was little and she had to go to bed in her room, in the dark, all by herself. How could she know how much time had passed, til it was morning?

If the bullet moves at a third of light speed, and she's been moving for an hour of subjective time, is anybody she knows on Earth even alive? 

What if it's been a minute? A year?

The unfamiliar stars make patterns, slowly. 

*

 

She's in the cargo hold of an airplane on the way to Japan. It's going to be her first big solo adventure outside the X-Mansion. She's going to find the truth about her dad. She's going to save her dad!

If only she hadn't come directly from a skating lesson. She'll have to spend the entire flight phased; otherwise she might freeze to death, even if she had warmer clothes. If only she had something besides the cargo loading manual to read.

*

Red taillights and yellow headlights on a low-flying plane interrupt the disc of the moon. The night air smells like alcohol and clarity.

"I think if you two were meant to be together," she hears, "it would've happened by now."

*

Hijack still looked like a kid the last time Kitty saw him, with the soulpatch and the plucked eyebrows and the whipsaw disposition between eager-to-please and eager-to-establish-independence. But now? He looks like an adult—a mind-controlled adult, Kitty reminds herself; it's not his fault—proudly standing on top of a great concrete tower at Denver International Airport and calling all the airplanes in the world to Colorado, just east of the peaks in the Rockies, where they will all smash into one another, ensuring that whoever was mind-controlling David Bond would have unchallengeable supremacy over the skies.

David is waving his arms. He looks glazed, almost drunk. He's not in charge of himself, but he has to be taken out—that is, his powers do—before whoever is running him can be stopped. And he looks vulnerable from above, as Kitty plummets toward him, able to control her fall only a little with the glider panels, modeled on Banshee's, built into her new costume. 

If she hadn't given up being an administrator, gone back to just being a teacher, she could never have figured out how to use these things—in effect, how to fly. At least for short distances, at least when she starts from a height, or from an airplane. Flying is fun. She can feel the air around here, fully material for a moment, before she phases again.

The mission is no fun. She's going to have to disrupt the electronic call-and-response at the source, by phasing through David Bond himself. Will it work? Will it kill him if it does?

He doesn't even look surprised when she phases through him, and disrupts, not his own human brain, but the electronic signals that are his power, that let him speak to all the machines. Those closest to the mountain range-- the stark blue curtain behind them-- begin to turn, as Kitty looks up, and then down at David, who gulps, and yelps, and faints. She almost killed him. But she didn't. He still looks glazed. But he looked relieved.

Overhead, two jumbo jets stop descending and level off into safe paths, headed far away from each other. Air traffic control will take it from here.

*

Time slows down, and it doesn't. She's panicking, and she's not; she's almost resigned. The Latverian sunrise climbs the icy peaks, slips over the turrets, animates the dust motes in the castle space—half royal guest bedroom, half containment lab—that holds the tank that holds Kitty, if anything can. 

Soon no thing on Earth will be able to hold her; soon she'll have given up her physical form, deciding when to end a process that she thinks will probably end soon anyway. Victor von Doom and Reed Richards and Logan and Storm and half the adults she cares about (along with a few she'd like to punch) are fighting over her, and for what? It's like she's caused somebody's divorce. Again. And this time in a way that imperils the Earth. What if the Brood strike again, or the Marauders come back, and the X-Men can't do anything, because they've devoted everything to her? It's not fair; no kid is worth that much. Certainly she can't be. It's not fair to the others to stay.

She's going to miss Elfquest, though. And Doug. And Ororo. And dancing. And Lockheed. And Ilya. She's going to miss Ilya so much. But she can't be a burden—

There are pale green and lavender flowers, like buttercups, but taller, growing out of the cracks in the turret. So Latverian: the world's most advanced technology, outside Wakanda, but the routine maintenance is scanty at best, because everything has to look old. (Kitty is never going to look old.) It would be so easy to stop being a burden, stop taking up the adults' attention and time and technology, stop causing fights—she can just reach out to the farthest flower, once the sunlight catches its stem— it would be like flying for real, not walking on air and keeping her footsteps solid so she can come back down to earth (she's done with solidity, she thinks), but flying, like steam from a kettle, like smoke on the wind—

Is that Franklin behind her? If Franklin wants her to stay—

*

Starting the Blackbird's engine indoor makes the loudest sound she's ever heard, and the hottest temperature, by far, she's ever felt; nobody tangible could tolerate these flames, that exhaust. The walls of the hangar certainly could not. Nor could the terrifying alien. It's a good thing she didn't, after all, leave the mansion for kung pao beef on Christmas eve, the way the Prydes usually do. 

The beef, Kitty thinks, would be so many briquettes. And now, so will this ungodly monobrow-and-claws creature, this discount-horror-film exoskeleton. (She's trying to think about what a superhero would say to make light of the creature; in fact, of course, she's terrified.)

The engine itself survived; for all the Blackbird knows, it's just gone for a test flight. But of course it's still there.

So is Kitty. The newest member of the X-Men turns solid again and looks at her ankles, her wrists, the smoldering ash, the bent steel, the automatic anti-pyrokinetic foam dispensers kicking in above her, their fizzy high-tech hum. She's safe. For now. She's survived the experience.

*

It's one thing to throw out a T-shirt too worn to keep wearing, although Kitty almost never does that anymore; she keeps it all for sleepwear. It's another thing to realize that you've outgrown your first set of training bras, and maybe outgrown your second set, the modest A-cups that were no trouble under a leotard. You're bigger than you used to be. More sensitive, too, in ways you didn't think possible. It's time for the mall. Does Kitty even know what she wants? 

Does she really have to give up the one with the diamond pattern, the one that—

"I think you should keep that one around, roomie," Illyana says from the now-open doorway. Illyana is in a position to see the stack of outgrown or worn out bras and panties (and a couple of pairs of summer shorts, and some too-thin socks) on the pink quilts and bedspread. Midafternoon sun, through the bedroom window, makes the cotton look even paler than it would be anyway, highlighting outlines, tangles among the blue and white straps.

"Why?" Kitty tosses the pale blue training bra with the diamond patterns—her first, she realizes, and one that now gives her no support at all—into the air at Illyana. Without any wires or plastic rosettes to weigh it down, it seems to flap its soft triangular wings; it settles on Illyana's wrist and droops like a moth. Kitty turns around as if to attend with entire seriousness to the collection of underthings.

"It has good associations," Illyana says, stretching the bra's elastic back, pretending to snap it, then balling it up and tossing the ball of fabric back so that it bops Kitty between her shoulderblades. "It's a bra that can fly."

"It doesn't fit me now, though—oh!" Kitty says, because Illyana has come all the way up to Kitty from behind; the slightly bigger, broader Russian girl fits her body against the Midwestern mutant's so that they are big spoon and little spoon, but standing up beside the bed, rather than on it. Illyana's hands are on Kitty's breasts, her fingertips on Kitty's nipples, which are changing shape fast, getting almost stiff, ready to be touched and rubbed and attended to; around them, breasts first and then rib cage and then everything, Kitty feels her body as slightly curvier than it used to be, firmer, more real. 

Then Kitty phases completely so that Illyana falls forward on the bed, onto the pile of training bras and starter bras and leggings for dancing and exercise shorts, and then Kitty hovers above her, half-phased, almost flying, and gently falls on top of her.

Illyana picks the balled-up training bra and stretches it out across Kitty's.... shoulder blades. "What, doesn't it fit now?" Illyana asks. "It used to fit....I thought you were science girl. Shouldn't we experiment?" Kitty wonders: if this is an experiment, maybe the first few times they hooked up, when Kitty's body was slightly different (Illyana has already clearly developed) was a kind of control?

And then Illyana's knee is between Kitty's thighs, and Kitty's head is resting on Illyana's shoulder, licking the Russian girl's ear, where a thin metal stud gives her a slight jolt, and the way that their bodies fit together, shoulder to shoulder, briefly breast to breast, gives her a bigger jolt than that-- she's an airplane about to take off-- and then there's enough distance between the girl on top (Kitty) and the girl on the bottom (Illyana) for Kitty to say a few more words.

"This is a very good experiment." Kitty says. "I think the Illyana fits this Kitty very well and needs to stay. However—"

Illyana's hands are up and under Kitty's button-down, under the one bra that does fit her these days, unhooking it and then reaching up to cup her again, and then withdrawing, looking up into her brown eyes—

"—the scientific method requires that all results be replicated. Further testing may be required."

Illyana's knee is exactly where Illyana's knee should be, fierce and unyielding, and then Illyana's hands are there too, and then there's a zipper that isn't there, and all the stars collide in Kitty's head, and she feels smaller than everything, bigger than anything, ready to split the world at its cloth seams, soaring, circling, everywhere at once, and then she sinks back into her friend's embrace, held in the softest, strongest arms.

*

There's a teakettle already whistling when Kitty wakes up, slightly sweaty, short sapphire nightshirt tangled between her legs, where, she realizes, her hand had been a few moments ago. What's today's agenda? Physics for Fighting Mutants, which she co-teaches on Wednesdays and Thursdays; a Danger Room session with the sophomores and Angel Salvadore, focusing on controlled flight; a conference call with the U of C. Not bad. Oh, and possibly dinner with a few apprentice Sorcerers Supreme, if Illyana wants nonmagic company on her trip to Greenwich Village. Sometimes she does; sometimes she clearly does not. (How lovely to be with someone who says just what she wants.)

Illyana, of course, drinks tea from a glass; she hands Kitty another glass, the strainer still in it. "That was quite a dream, roomie." They still call each other roomie sometimes. It's a joke that became not a joke.

"More of a history lesson, honestly," Kitty says, sitting up to take Illyana's hand. She remembers that hand covered in silver armor; she remembers it, maybe minutes ago, as soft and strong and supple and delightful. She doesn't want to give it up. "And some flying."

"Was I in it?" Illyana asks? "How did it end?"

Kitty smiles. "You were in all the best parts."

**Author's Note:**

> The scene with David Bond (Hijack) is set in the future, as is the final scene, part of the Days of Future Middle-Age universe in which Kitty and Illyana have settled down. Everything else should be canon compliant. As always, please let me know if you find mistakes!


End file.
